HAL Helicopter Museum – 13 March 2010

A little known treasure of Indian aviation history on the Old Airport road, between HAL airport and Marathalli junction, is the Helicopter Museum of HAL. It is a place that not many know of, and not many visit. Hence, it is always bereft of a crowd. However, we really enjoyed visiting it as it uncovered the history of the helicopter in India. There are a lot of interesting exhibits here.

On the outside of the building, there are a few old aircrafts and old helicopters, with a small writeup next to each exhibit. One can walk around the building taking in all the history. There is also a small cafe there.

  

There are basically two small buildings to cover in a visit there. The main building houses the artifacts, small scale models and blown up photos of historic significance to aviation in India. There is an interesting display of embles of the airforces of each country!

 

 

On the first floor of the main building is a small shop which sells scaled models of aircrafts. The model aircraft shop is run by HAL employees and the proceeds from that go for the welfare of them. The price of the model planes are cheaper than outside. The HAL employees are very helpful and informative. They can tell you anything about the plane that you are picking up. There is also a flight simulator, which is nothing but a small video game you play on a computer controlled by a joystick.

The other small building houses many many blown up photographs of historic significance to aviation in India. There are multiple rooms, taking one down the decades of aviation in India.

It was very interesting to go through the photographs and relive some of the events that we had heard of.

All in all a very very good visit. It certainly beats having to do what this guy was doing (up on a tree, looking at the HAL airport runway)